Listen — Understand Before You Act
Listening is the foundation of trustworthiness. It begins with making space for community members to speak openly about their lived experiences. These conversations must be free from dismissal, rebuttal, or tokenism. Acknowledging the historical and present-day realities that shape how communities perceive institutions is essential to building authentic, lasting trustworthiness.
Purpose: To recognize and validate community experiences with humility and respect.
Goal: Identification of recurring themes and truths that will guide institutional reflection and change.
Tools and Resources to Support Listening
Step 1: Host Speak Freely sessions. These example guides are designed to help institutions host listening sessions, where community members are invited to share their current and historical experiences. These sessions are designed to center community voices and uncover patterns that reflect how trust thrives, has been broken, or was never built.
Speak Freely Session Guide (PDF)
by TRUE Together: Trust, Respect, Unity, and Equity; Sacramento, California
Speak Freely Facilitator Guide (PDF)
by United in Trust: A Multi-sectoral Community-Academic Approach to Building and Evaluating Trust in North Omaha, Nebraska
Step 2: Identify key themes that emerged from the listening sessions about what makes an organization more or less trustworthy. The mapping document outlines a community engaged mapping approach pioneered by United in Trust: A Multi-sectoral Community-Academic Approach to Building and Evaluating Trust in North Omaha, Nebraska
Mapping Shared Understandings (PDF)
Step 3: Share back and verify with your community partners. The United in Trust team created this document to share the results of their theme mapping with community partners to organize common concerns, priorities, and patterns and to inform institutional action in preparation for the Reflect phase. Decide with your community the most effective way to share back lessons from listening.
"Some participants shared things they had never said in public before - that's the power of these conversations."
— Community Representative, Alton, Illinois